¶ … Communism Affact World During the Cold War
There is much controversy with regard to the effects of communism on the Cold War, as with the Iron Curtain falling in the early nineties across Eastern Europe people have come to have a somewhat distorted understanding of the concept. To paraphrased Winston Churchill, the reality is that the victors are responsible for writing history while the masses have a limited understanding of events that actually happened in the past. With the general public having a one-sided understanding of what happened during the Cold War, many are inclined to blame communism for much of the suffering occurring throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Many fail to comprehend that communism as an ideology is very different from how diverse dictators throughout history have interpreted it. Similarly, numerous democratic countries are not necessarily as praiseworthy as some might be inclined to believe. Furthermore, concepts like democracy and communism should not be considered individually,...
Gorbachev's ideas of reform, the glasnost and the perestroika, stand as a perfect example concerning how someone can see communism standing together with democratic principles. In spite of the fact that change was especially difficult in the last few years of the Soviet Union, it is intriguing to consider how people accustomed with communism could actually see the two ideologies working together. "At the same time, we see that changes for the better are taking place slowly, that the task of restructuring has turned out to be more difficult than it had seemed to us earlier, and that the causes of the problems that have accumulated in society are more deep-rooted than we had thought." (Gorbachev outlines Glasnost and Perestroika 288-289)
In order to be able to see matters from an objective point-of-view, one actually needs to employ a subjective…
